through Linz, bearing me, grateful for
considerate and sleeping companions, easy
to say now we’re going somewhere safe
travelling without earplugs
spotted cows on pasture slopes
moo where upper alpine snow
leaks into June-fed creeks constrained
in narrow rock walls, each unmoved
by burgeoning white
when evening arrives, all noises
cease here in my pension
except for one: someone’s
far-off singing, perceptible
only when other sounds
subside, its pitch insisting
my tired mind identify
and end its e-e-e at once
and failing to do so
I resort to pillow-wrapping
my head, to await any dream
wherein I escape that timbre
not unlike the one (I begin to think)
we hear just before dying: such
thoughts entangle the traveller
unwisely travelling earplug-less
and who is vexed to discover
next morning the mosquito buzz
arises from the radio at his bedside
an opera-broadcasting station
not turned completely off
as if the previous person here
had been malignly planning ahead
to effect another’s discomfort
and thus he suffers because he assumes
he can never correct creation
believing glumly the arrow
of the irreparable always aims for him
yet in the cool of the next dawn
he’s enchanted to encounter birds
new to him singing in Italian
on the occasion of visiting Auden’s grave
somehow I don’t expect sighing evergreens
or cruel April’s birds tuning up their notes
or the autobahn’s whine beyond the church’s
sweet-cream-pastry-coloured plaster walls
though I recognize the iron cross and plaque
labelling the deceased as poet and man of letters
and somehow the ivy’s dense entanglement
surprises me as do wilting winter pansies
on top of the small rectangle of the plot itself
(how can it hold such long, grand bones?)
and a two-pence copper coin lying atop moss
that says he is loved by someone from home
and those admirers from other lands (like me)
know better than to swipe this little token
even as I feel its melancholic foreignness
enter my thumb and vibrate with an eagerness
to claim the wrinkled poet as my own
yes, I know how men slide daily under earth
and what remains of them upside stays briefly
before it too leaves like wind or highway noise
while calamity clots nearby, one hamlet away
even as that woman in her red coat crosses
a green field, happy black terrier leaping up
to her hand, as a crow settles his wings on pale
winter stubble, and an old man in a crushed hat
posts a letter at a yellow box – and may a reply
come sooner than he expects from a grandson
he loves to praise as only a free man can praise
but likely it’s a bill, what must be paid
in a certain period before penalties apply
and debts accrue and demands mount
and a day passes in which he fails to relish
this heaven-side of grass, neglects the glory
in birdsong! – and in men whose songs rise
so smoothly from their natures we forget
how both ease and fine form came to pass
out of a morning’s work in the low house
with green decorative siding not far from
his grave, a domicile easy to pass by without
a murmur of wonder – though the German words
under his photo leave me squinting, envious
of those who know more than I, who knew him
as a neighbour, summer visitor to Kirchstetten
on a back road bordered by willows ready to bud
from soggy forest floor with leaves faint for now
in Duino
narrow roads off the autobahn
offer tour buses no place to park
should passengers want
to see where Rilke slept
Princess della Torre e Tasso’s gilded
family portraits of past aristocrats
staring down, uncomprehending
I step onto a balcony overlooking
the Gulf of Trieste, notice no angels
though commercial oyster beds
at the mouth of the Isonzo River
provide a symmetry the poet
may have admired from his cliff path
I am thinking a trace of gravitas
might remain on this stone
balustrade he may have touched
(or pounded) and where
in three languages is written
on its limestone lip the command
not to lean over, which I heed
Apollo beams down to warm
my thoughts again, so once more
I wonder how the poet saw from here
‘wind full of cosmic space’
what remains for me white cliffs
and blue sea, curve of the gulf
and sunlight calling one wave
to appear just as another dips and
disappears without any ‘endlessly
anxious hands’ framing
what cannot so easily pass away
Nicholas